“City & Country Hawaii”.

Item Details

Honolulu, Honolulu Print Makers, 1945, Single sheet, block print.

DAS, Elsie Jensen (1903-1962). “City & Country Hawaii”. Block print, 12¾ × 9½ unwatermarked laid paper; 3-color print using green black and light brown. Honolulu Print Makers, 1945

OCLC shows one holding (the Bishop Museum in Honolulu).

Accompanying this print is a short description of it from which we have extracted the paragraph below:

“Elsie Jensen Das has been asked to make the 13th  annual. Gift Print for presentation to the Associate Members for 1945. Happily the war has ended and the print she has made ends on a happy note—the nonchalance of the Hawaiian lei women who laid down the needle and flowers and took up hoe and broom to clean our city streets during war time. All of us have been impressed by their good humor, their good humor, their acceptance of their job with dignity and their ability to hana-hana with joy.”

Das was born of Danish parents in Portland, Oregon. She  studied art at the Portland Art School; in 1924 she moved to San Francisco and began studying art at UC Berkeley; apparently she was not stimulated by her design class, and in 1928 she went to Hawaii to visit her sister, Ellen who had married Gobindram Watumull who was in charge of the East India Store. 

Elsie was soon employed as a window designer in her brother-in-law’s store and also started to design fabrics, and later clothes. It was the Aloha shirt that she is remembered for. In 1931 She also. married an Indian, Upendra Kumar Das, a friend of her brother-in-law's;  Mr. Das was head of research at the Hawaiian Sugar Planter's Association.  He was killed In an explosion at work in 1937. Elsie remind in Hawaii with her young daughter. During the war, Elsie worked as a camouflage designer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers based in Hawaii. One source reported that she was the first woman to draft camouflage designs for the Army. Another wrote: “It is said that every strategic spot between Honolulu and Wake Island was camouflaged with Elsie Das designs.”